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Saturday, August 11, 2012

The Manhattan Project Spawned Stuxnet

During the summer of 1939 the brilliant Albert Einstein was
asked to partake in plans to persuade Franklin D. Roosevelt and the American
military to start the “Manhattan Project”. During the same year it was widely
speculated that German scientists were also experimenting with similar ideas in
nuclear fission and the race was on. With the Germens already experimenting and
pushing their reign across Europe it was imperative that America be the first
country to have nuclear weapons.

During the next 5 years the construction of top secret bases
and equipment were constructed to have research completed and to create science
no one’s done before; not only theoretically designing the reactors to produce
plutonium, but being able to both create and produce nuclear fission. Here we
see both academic and operational efforts working in tandem to produce a weapon
that will change the face of modern warfare.

Dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagaski are still widely debated. While dropping their
newly created weapons did help put an end to the war, its still widely believed
that another driving factor to dropping the weapon was to show Russia that
America has nuclear arms and isn’t afraid to use them. Deploying these weapons on the population of
Japan is also still widely disputed. Wondering why America didn’t drop the
warheads on a military base, instead of a civilian neighborhood, is still a
point of contention.

Right or wrong after these warheads were dropped and the
world was ushered intothe nuclear
age whether we were ready for it or not. The pandora ’s box was now blown wide
open. Not only are we concerned about nuclear attacks in modern times, but we’re
trying to stop others from having access to technology we built.
Fast forwarded 70 years and we find the pandora’s box is still wide open
and getting larger. Down the rabbit hole we go.

The year is now 2010 and due hostility between Iran and the
west a highly complicated piece of malware is created to target only the Siemens
supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and it’s given the
name Stuxnet. The particular SCADA systems Stuxnet was coded to attack are isolated
only to the Natanz Iranian nuclear plant, but due to a programming error the worm spread
to an engineer’s laptop working on the Iranian centrifuges and escaped into the wild. History was made once again.

Due to the complexity of the code, the cost of the equipment
needed to test on (SCADA), the sheer amount of zero day exploits it targeted with intimate knowledge
of the exact PLCs, the only culprit to such a sophisticated software was a nation state.
When looking at most worms on the internet they normally have a few factors
behind their creation: theft of financials, stealing intellectual data or espionage.
The Stuxnet malware didn’t have any of these characteristics and was there for
one reason: stopping the Iranians from going nuclear.

During the years prior to the worm being deployed fear of a nuclear
Iran and failure of diplomatic pressure and sanction lead America and Israel to
embark on something that was never done before. President George Bush at the time started project
“Operation Olympic Games” which was then taken over by President Barack Obama
who continued the operation to develop a cyber-weapon aimed at Iran. Since it’s
still early on in the history of Stuxnet it’s still heavily speculated that the
Americans and Israel’s worked together to develop this technology to stop a
common enemy, much like America did with the Manhattan project.

The acquisition of zero day vulnerabilities and SCADA
systems were researched and built to test the code being deployed to the Natanz
plant. This is no small feat and most likely took the nation states involved
years to research, code and develop. Once again the world was ushered into the
next world of modern warfare. The cyber age was now upon us.

There are many similarities between the Manhattan Project
and Operation Olympic Games, both of which are projects where America is
working with other countries to develop technology never before used in modern
warfare. In the Manhattan Project American refugees from fascist regimes in
Europe assisted with American scientists to develop a weapon before their
common enemy could achieve it the same goal. With the example of Operation
Olympic Games America once again teamed up with another country, mainly Israel,
to develop another weapon in attempt to stop their common enemy Iran before
they could produce what they assume would be a weapon of mass destruction.

It’s interesting to look at the reason Stuxnet was produced in the first place. The chief
reason behind America creating Stuxnet was to destroy or slow the progress of
Iran from having nuclear capabilities in fear they’d used this new found capability
for evil. This is the exact opposite of the Manhattan project and shows the
dangers of leveraging new technology without thinking about the long term
ramifications of their use. The Stuxnet malware was made chiefly to plug a hole
created 70 years earlier by the Manhattan project. Now decades later we’re still
dealing with the rabbit hole created with the birth atomic weapons and we’re
creating cyber weapons in attempts to put a stop to what we created in the
first place. The proof of concept is out in the wild now and any nation state
can start creating cyber weapons of this caliber without much difficulty.

One can only imagine what will come from the release of
Stuxnet and other cyber weapons and what we’ll have to do in the next 70 to try
and cap the damage that was created.